Research in recent years has encouraged those of us who question the popular alarm over allegedly man-made global warming. Actually, the move from “global warming” to “climate change” indicated the silliness of this issue. The climate has been changing since the Earth was formed. This normal course is now taken to be evidence of doom.

Individuals and organizations highly vested in disaster scenarios have relentlessly attacked scientists and others who do not share their beliefs. The attacks have taken a threatening turn.

As to the science itself, it’s worth noting that all predictions of warming since the onset of the last warming episode of 1978-98 - which is the only period that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) attempts to attribute to carbon-dioxide emissions - have greatly exceeded what has been observed. These observations support a much reduced and essentially harmless climate response to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide.

In addition, there is experimental support for the increased importance of variations in solar radiation on climate and a renewed awareness of the importance of natural unforced climate variability that is largely absent in current climate models. There also is observational evidence from several independent studies that the so-called “water vapor feedback,” essential to amplifying the relatively weak impact of carbon dioxide alone on Earth temperatures, is canceled by cloud processes.

There are also claims that extreme weather - hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, floods, you name it - may be due to global warming. The data show no increase in the number or intensity of such events. The IPCC itself acknowledges the lack of any evident relation between extreme weather and climate, though allowing that with sufficient effort some relation might be uncovered.

World leaders proclaim that climate change is our greatest problem, demonizing carbon dioxide. Yet atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide have been vastly higher through most of Earth’s history. Climates both warmer and colder than the present have coexisted with these higher levels.

Currently elevated levels of carbon dioxide have contributed to increases in agricultural productivity. Indeed, climatologists before the recent global warming hysteria referred to warm periods as “climate optima.” Yet world leaders are embarking on costly policies that have no capacity to replace fossil fuels but enrich crony capitalists at public expense, increasing costs for all, and restricting access to energy to the world’s poorest populations that still lack access to electricity’s immense benefits.

Billions of dollars have been poured into studies supporting climate alarm, and trillions of dollars have been involved in overthrowing the energy economy. So it is unsurprising that great efforts have been made to ramp up hysteria, even as the case for climate alarm is disintegrating.

The latest example began with an article published in the New York Times on Feb. 22 about Willie Soon, a scientist at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Mr. Soon has, for over 25 years, argued for a primary role of solar variability on climate. But as Greenpeace noted in 2011, Mr. Soon was, in small measure, supported by fossil-fuel companies over a period of 10 years.

The Times reintroduced this old material as news, arguing that Mr. Soon had failed to list this support in a recent paper in Science Bulletin of which he was one of four authors. Two days later Arizona Rep. Raul Grijalva, the ranking Democrat on the Natural Resources Committee, used the Times article as the basis for a hunting expedition into anything said, written and communicated by seven individuals - David Legates, John Christy, Judith Curry, Robert Balling, Roger Pielke Jr. , Steven Hayward and me - about testimony we gave to Congress or other governmental bodies. We were selected solely on the basis of our objections to alarmist claims about the climate.

In letters he sent to the presidents of the universities employing us (although I have been retired from MIT since 2013), Mr. Grijalva wanted all details of all of our outside funding, and communications about this funding, including “consulting fees, promotional considerations, speaking fees, honoraria, travel expenses, salary, compensation and any other monies.” Mr. Grijalva acknowledged the absence of any evidence but purportedly wanted to know if accusations made against Mr. Soon about alleged conflicts of interest or failure to disclose his funding sources in science journals might not also apply to us.

Perhaps the most bizarre letter concerned the University of Colorado’s Mr. Pielke. His specialty is science policy, not science per se, and he supports reductions in carbon emissions but finds no basis for associating extreme weather with climate. Mr. Grijalva’s complaint is that Mr. Pielke, in agreeing with the IPCC on extreme weather and climate, contradicts the assertions of John Holdren, President Obama’s science czar.

Mr. Grijalva’s letters convey an unstated but perfectly clear threat: Research disputing alarm over the climate should cease lest universities that employ such individuals incur massive inconvenience and expense - and scientists holding such views should not offer testimony to Congress. After the Times article, Sens. Edward Markey (D., Mass.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.) and Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.) also sent letters to numerous energy companies, industrial organizations and, strangely, many right-of-center think tanks (including the Cato Institute, with which I have an association) to unearth their alleged influence peddling.

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In their own words, their real agenda:

At a news conference in early February, 2005 in Brussels, Christiana Figueres, admitted that the goal of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to destroy capitalism.

“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reining for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,” she said. Referring to a new international treaty environmentalists hope will be adopted at the Paris climate change conference later this year, she added: “This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history."--Investor’s Business Daily, 10 February 2015

And, as EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy testified before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on July 23, 2014:

“The great thing about this [EPA Power Plan] proposal is that it really is an investment opportunity. This is not about pollution control.”

The use of petroleum is under attack as never before in today’s society. But contrary to the cries of critics, petroleum and the things people can do with petroleum are a modern miracle and a foundation of modern society.

Last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the United Nations called for the world to move to “near zero emissions” of carbon dioxide by the year 2100. President Obama has threatened to veto the Keystone XL pipeline bill. Activist Bill McKibben has launched a national effort to persuade universities and colleges to divest financial holdings in oil companies. These efforts target the oil industry with the aim of eliminating the societal use of petroleum.

But have you ever stopped to consider what petroleum products do for people each and every day?

Back in 1620, it took the 120 passengers and crew of the Mayflower 25 days to travel from England to what was to become America. Two passengers died on the voyage. Today, a jumbo jet safely carries more than 300 passengers the same distance in less than seven hours. Each day, 25,000 commercial aircraft transport 9 million passengers a combined total of 10 billion miles, all powered by aviation fuel from petroleum.

Back in the late 1800s, the horse-drawn carriage became a preferred mode of transportation in major cities. By 1890, the average New York citizen took 297 horse car rides per year. The 200,000 horses of New York deposited three to six million pounds of manure in stables and on streets each day. When the “horseless carriage” replaced the mess and smell of the horse-drawn carriage, many regarded the car as a pollution-control invention. Each day today, fuel from petroleum powers more than one billion automobiles across the world.

Historically, goods traded between societies were transported by camel, wagon, and sail. While trade has grown throughout history, the value of total world exports amounted to only about $10 billion per year in 1900, measured in today’s dollars. Since 1900, world exports have exploded, increasing 1,800 times to a total of $18 trillion per year in 2013. Each day, more than 100 million tons of freight is carried by ship, train, truck, and plane, with more than 90 percent powered by fuel from petroleum.

Back in 1809, Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte of France had a problem. When his armies marched across Europe, food supplies for his troops quickly spoiled. He offered a reward of 12,000 francs for a solution, which led to the invention of sterilized food sealed in tin cans. Historically, food was “packaged” in animal skins, glass, paper, metal cans, and wooden crates. Today, plastics from petroleum and other hydrocarbons provide safe, convenient, and inexpensive packaging for food and other products. More than two million plastic bottles and 1.3 billion plastic bags are consumed each day globally.

Each day, one-half million in-patient surgeries are performed across the world. Plastics from oil and natural gas play an essential role in modern medicine. Thousands of items, such as disposable catheters, surgical gloves, pharmaceutical drugs, hip implants and heart valves, bandages, and various parts of lab equipment are plastic, made from petroleum and other hydrocarbons.

Today we live in a golden age of low-cost energy. Just two hundred years ago, wood burning and human- and animal-muscle power provided more than 90 percent of society’s energy. Since 1800, global energy usage has increased by 26 times. Today, more than 30 percent of the world’s energy is provided by petroleum and more than 80 percent is provided by coal, natural gas, and oil.

Since 1800, global Gross Domestic Product has increased by a factor of 10, human life expectancy has more than doubled, and infant mortality is down by a factor of six. Since 1950, the years of education for world populations have more than doubled. In our golden age of hydrocarbon energy, people are wealthier, healthier, better educated, and enjoy more consumer goods and leisure time than any era in history.

Despite climate change warnings by the Obama administration and the United Nations, there is no evidence that carbon dioxide emissions from the petroleum industry have harmed a single person on Earth. Senior citizens continue to retire to southern states, disregarding foolish US government claims that warm climates are “dangerous.”

Satellite data shows global temperatures have been flat for the last 18 years, that storms are neither stronger nor more numerous than those of history, and that global sea ice extent remains at the 30-year average. Satellites further show that world vegetation has increased over the last 20 years, nourished by rising atmospheric CO2. And today’s polar bear populations are double the levels of 1960.

Nor is there evidence that petroleum use is causing increasing pollution of Earth’s environment. Today, air and water pollution is declining in all major industrialized nations. Nations that use the most energy and petroleum have the best air and water quality and the best methods for handling disposal of wastes. Trends indicate that developing nations will also achieve declining pollution levels as their national incomes rise.

We’re fortunate to be living in a golden age of energy, fueled by petroleum.

Steve Goreham is Executive Director of the Climate Science Coalition of America and author of the book The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania.

We ain’t seen nothing yet: The intense drought in California is only an appetizer compared with what’s coming this century across much of the western and central USA, according to a study out last Thursday.

During the years 2050 to 2100, the Southwest and Great Plains will face a persistent “megadrought” worse than anything seen in the past 1,000 years, and the dry conditions will be “driven primarily” by human-induced global warming, scientists said.

There’s at least an 80% chance of a megadrought in these regions if climate change continues unabated, Toby Ault, an atmospheric scientist at Cornell University and co-author of the research, said at a news conference Thursday in San Jose.

A megadrought is defined as a drought that lasts for decades or longer, such as those that scorched portions of the West in the 12th and 13th centuries. Ault said megadroughts should be considered a natural hazard on par with earthquakes and hurricanes.

To identify past droughts, scientists studied tree rings to find out how much - or little - rain fell hundreds or even thousands of years ago. Scientists used that historical data in combination with 17 different computer model simulations to predict what changes we may see this century.

The computers showed robust and consistent drying in the Southwest and Plains, due to a combination of reduced precipitation and warmer temperatures that dried out the soils.

“Natural droughts like the 1930s Dust Bowl and the current drought in the Southwest have historically lasted maybe a decade or a little less,” Ben Cook, climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and lead author of the study, said in a statement.

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Icecap comments:

First the authors admit it happened before in 12th and 13th century. So such a thing is not unprecedented. Indeed, droughts have multiyear and longer variability. Instrumental data indicate that the Dust Bowl of the 1930s and the 1950s drought were the most widespread twentieth-century droughts in the United States, while tree ring data indicate that the megadroughts over the 12th Century exceeded anything in the 20th Century in both spatial extent and duration.

Second, it is based on model simulations - the same models that have failed in every projection since the 1990s. Third the drought in Texas that they said was unprecedented was nothing like the multi year drought of the 1950s. Fourth the Calfirnia drought is related to the warm water off the west coast as an after effect of the super La Nina of 2010/11 which led to cold water there and warm to the west that migrated to the west coast. It will be gone in a year and rains will return. In fact this rainy season though not the heavy wet El Nino is running near normal for rains in the northern parts of California and the Sierra though snowpack lags. There wil be more episodic rains and snows and a slow exit from the drought can be expected the next year or so.

And finally, since, the 60 year cycle max has past, and the Atlantic cooling will accelerate the PDO will resume its cold mode and the sun will continue its dive into a 200 year minimum, temperatures will cool not warm the next few decades or longer. Ironically historic megadroughts have been common in cold periods because they tend to have amplified pattern and show more persistence in the patters leading to cold and warm areas. wet and dry areas. Their models are worthess because they do not consider the oceans and sun and they projections are based entirely on radiative factors and assumptions, many of which have been shown to be wrong. Their failures prove that.

Update: The snowstorm in the northeast less than a week after the big blizzard, made it the snowiest 10 day period ever in Boston beating out January 1996. 47.9” fell in the Boston area the last 10 days beating out the 36.6” ending in early January 1996. Over 52 inches fell in the Worcester area in just the last 2 storms where another 17.5 fell after the record 34.5 inch snowstorm fell last week. During the storms, temperatures have been as cold as the single digits and in Maine below zero with heavy snows. If this global warming gets any worse, we will all freeze to death.

The 16.2 inches recorded at Chicago’s O’Hare just during the hours of February 1st (out of 19.3 inches total) were the most ever for any February day in Chicago. The 10.5 inches recorded on February 1st at Rockford (out of 11.9 inches total) ranked #2 all time for the date and #3 all time for any February day in Rockford. For the event as a whole, the 19.3 inches at O’Hare ranks as #5 out of all snow events in Chicago, while the 11.9 inches at Rockford ranks as #10 overall for that city.

Flashback 2000: ‘Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past’: According to Dr. David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, within a few years winter snowfall will become ‘a very rare and exciting event. Children just aren’t going to know what snow is.’

The IPCC and US government reports through 2007 had projected snows would become much less common as the climate warms especially in the cities.

Environmentalist from Princeton Michael Oppenheimer and RFK Jr, in the year before the Snomageddon winter both bemoaned their children would never get to enjoy sledding like they did as young in the 1960s.

The New York Times had an article in February, 2014 titled ‘The end of snow.’ The article documented how snow soon was going to be a distant memory and our kids would never see it except in news reels.

EPA’s chief Gina McCarthy said in Colorado snows are decreasing and soon Colorado would be like Amarillo (ironically which 12-14 inches of snow that day).

Oh really?

5 of the top 10 snowstorms have occurred since 2003 in NYC. And the decade has been the snowiest in the eastern US cities since the 1950s (just 5 years in).

And now the same scientists tell us that snowstorms are increasing and they have long known it:

“We’ve long known that warmer-than-normal winters favor snow storms. Temporal and Spatial Characteristics of Snowstorms in the Contiguous United States found we are seeing more northern snow storms and that we get more snow storms in warmer years: The temporal distribution of snowstorms exhibited wide fluctuations during 1901-2000....Upward trends occurred in the upper Midwest, East, and Northeast, and the national trend for 1901-2000 was upward, corresponding to trends in strong cyclonic activity.... Assessment of the January-February temperature conditions again showed that most of the United States had 71%-80% of their snowstorms in warmer-than-normal years.’

A future with wetter and warmer winters, which is one outcome expected, will bring more snowstorms than in 1901-2000. Agee (1991) found that long-term warming trends in the United States were associated with increasing cyclonic activity in North America, further indicating that a warmer future climate will generate more winter storms.

Oh really?

As Joe Bastardi noted, the last two storms with better than 20 to 1 ratios in areas near Boston occur in colder weather not warm years.

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Lets look at North American snowcover versus temperatures. And see also that for the Northern Hemisphere winters, 4 of the top 5 winters for snowcover extent have occurred since 2007/08.

JB and I have agreed that the warm water off the east coast ls warmer after a few quiet tropical seasons and with the AMO in transition does helps provide enhanced moisture for the snows but again the ratios in the very cold snow events pumps up totals too. In warm winters like 1997/98, 2001/02 or 2011/12, rains are more likely.

National Weather Service experts misjudged the path and impact of the blizzard that struck the Northeast on Monday and Tuesday, in large part because they trusted the wrong forecasting model, several independent meteorologists said.

Rather than rely on their own forecasting system-upgraded in recent weeks - the federal experts placed their faith instead on a well-regarded European computer model that predicted the worst of this storm would squarely hit New York City. That system earlier had outperformed the U.S. forecasting system in predicting the path of superstorm Sandy.

This time, the European forecasting model was wrong, several commercial forecasters said. That model, one of four complex computer simulations normally used to calculate weather patterns along the Eastern seaboard, predicted that the heaviest snow would fall between 50 and 100 miles farther west than actually occurred. Still, it correctly calculated the broader outlines of the blizzard. As predicted, the storm pounded parts of Long Island, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Maine, with winds in excess of 50 mph and snow in some locales up to 30 inches deep.

Experts predicted the blizzard nicknamed Juno could dump record snow amounts on New York City. This timelapse view of Manhattan during the storm shows that the reality was far less impressive. Other parts of the Northeast received record snowfalls.

“Too much trust was based on a single model, and there was not enough emphasis on uncertainty,” said Jeff Masters, chief meteorologist at Weather Underground, a commercial forecasting service. “The European model was about 100 miles off. That is a big deal for a heavy snow situation”.

The National Weather Service had recently improved its own system, called the Global Forecast System, and its forecast correctly predicted that the storm would go farther out to sea, away from New York City.

Joe D’Aleo, one of the chief forecasters at Weatherbell Analytics LLC, a commercial forecasting company based in New York, said the revamped system was perhaps still too new to be considered completely reliable. “It has not been battle-tested,” he said.

Even so, some uncertainty is the norm. “The models are very rarely exactly on track,” Mr. D’Aleo.

The National Weather Service in Washington, D.C., didn’t respond to an inquiry about its forecasting models today. In a statement this morning, the service’s New York office said, “The science of forecasting storms, while continually improving, still can be subject to error, especially if we’re on the edge of the heavy precipitation shield. Efforts, including research, are already under way to more easily communicate that forecast uncertainty.”

Republicans on Wednesday agreed that climate change is not a hoax. Sort of.

In what The Washington Post characterizes as a “nifty, if insincere, bit of politics,” Republicans successfully parsed language in an amendment to the Senate’s Keystone XL pipeline bill that stated climate change “is real and not a hoax.”

Democrats had been trying to force Republicans to state, on the record, their positions on human contributions to climate change.

In an act of chicanery, Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe, who authored a book on the subject entitled “The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future,” argued in favor of the amendment, stating climate change is not a hoax.

“The hoax is that there are some people that are so arrogant to think that they are so powerful that they can change climate. Man can’t change climate.”

The hoax, according to Inhofe, was the idea that man was responsible for global warming.

Just before the vote, Inhofe sent a cryptic message on Twitter alluding to something in the works.

Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island had attached the “hoax” language to the Keystone bill.

It was expected to fail, but Republicans successfully altered the wording so that they could vote for the bill while continuing to argue that climate change was not man-made.

The only Republican who did not vote for the amendment was Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker.

“With Inhofe’s re-framing the question, the Democrats, trying to engineer a gotcha moment, ended up empty-handed on the vote, with neither the satisfaction of nailing down opposition to scientific consensus and without a point of leverage for future discussions of addressing the warming planet,” according to Post writer Philip Bump.

Politico reports that a GOP Senate aide needled Democrats following the vote, questioning why Democrats were wasting their time trying to “embarrass” Republicans on climate change instead of “offering substantive proposals” on carbon tax or cap-and-trade emissions legislation.

“Democrats are stuck in messaging mode,” the aide said. Have been for 6 years.

In an eye-opening study published in the Chinese Science Bulletin, Yan et al. (2014) recount how they derived high-resolution sea surface temperature (SST) histories of two 80-year time windows centered at approximately AD 990 and AD 50 within the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA) and the Roman Warm Period (RWP), respectively, by analyzing the Sr/Ca ratios and δ18O values of Tradacna gigas (giant clam) shells collected from the northern South China Sea.

As indicated in the figure below, this undertaking revealed that the mean annual SSTs of the 80-year periods centered on AD 990 (MCA) and AD 50 (RWP) were 0.8C and 1.4C higher than the mean SST during the AD 1994-2005 portion of the Current Warm Period (CWP). Likewise, they also report that the mean summer SSTs of the MCA and RWP were, respectively, 0.2 and 1.0C higher than that of the CWP, while the mean winter SSTs of the MCA and RWP were, respectively, 1.3 and 1.8C higher than that of the CWP.

In commenting on their findings, the five Chinese researchers say “our well-calibrated high-resolution tropical SST records, which suggested a warmer MCA than recent decades, did not agree with the results of the IPCC fourth report, which suggested that the recent decades were the warmest in at least the past 1,300 years.” And they additionally go on to say that their new temperature reconstruction is “not the only evidence in eastern Asia for a warmer MCA than recent decades.”

Yan et al. note, for example, that a winter temperature reconstruction for eastern China based on crop distribution data recorded in Chinese historical documents has also “showed a distinct warm period (AD 930-1310) in the MCA,” when “temperatures in the warmest 30-year period were 0.9C higher than those of 1951-1980,” citing Ge et al. (2003). In addition, they note that “tree ring research from the mid-eastern Tibetan Plateau suggested that the temperatures during AD 864-882 and AD 965-994 were comparable or warmer than those during AD 1970-2000,” citing Liu et al. (2009).

Last of all, the Chinese group of five write that a “recent study in Qaidam Basin of northwest China also indicated a warmer MCA,” noting that “quantitative reconstructions from Sugan Lake and Gahai Lake both suggested a much higher temperature in the MCA than in the recent warm period,” citing He et al. (2013). And, we might add, the second NIPCC report of 2013 also provides a wealth of data that contradict the claim of the IPCC that “recent decades were the warmest in at least the past 1,300 years,” clearly demonstrating that there has been nothing unusual or unprecedented about the mean level of global warmth experienced over the past 18 years of no significant upward or downward trend.

The “crisis” was global cooling, until Earth stopped cooling around 1976. It was global warming, until our planet stopped warming around 1995. The alarmist mantra then became “climate change” or “climate disruption” or “extreme weather.” Always manmade. Since Earth’s climate often fluctuates, and there are always weather extremes, such claims can never be disproven, certainly not to the alarmists’ satisfaction.

Alarmists say modern civilization’s “greenhouse gas” emissions are causing profound climate change - by replacing the powerful, interconnected solar and other natural forces that have driven climate and weather patterns and events since Earth and human history began. They insist that these alleged human-induced changes are already happening and are already disastrous. Pope Francis says we are already witnessing a “great cataclysm” for our planet, people and environment.

However, there is no cataclysm, now or imminent, even as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have gone well past the alleged 350 parts-per-million “tipping point,” and now hover near 400 ppm (0.04%). There has been no warming since 1995, and recent winters have been among the coldest in centuries in the United Kingdom and continental Europe, despite steadily rising levels of plant-fertilizing CO2.

As of January 12, 2015, it has been 3,365 days (9.2 years!) since a Category 3-5 hurricane hit the US mainland. This is by far the longest such stretch since record-keeping began in 1900, if not since the American Civil War. Sea levels are barely rising, at a mere seven inches per century. Antarctic sea ice is expanding to new records; Arctic ice has also rebounded. Polar bears are thriving. In fact:

Every measure of actual evidence contradicts alarmist claims and computer model predictions. No matter how fast or sophisticated those models are, feeding them false or unproven assumptions about CO2 and manipulated or “homogenized” temperature data still yields garbage output, scenarios and predictions.

That’s why alarmists also intoned the “peak oil” and “resource depletion” mantra - until fracking produced gushers of new supplies. So now they talk about “sustainable development,” which really means “whatever we advocate is sustainable; whatever we despise and oppose is unsustainable.”

USEPA Administrator Gina McCarthy also ignores climate realities. Her agency is battling coal-fired power plants (and will go after methane and gas-fired generators next), to “stop climate change” and “trigger a range of investments” in innovation and a “clean power future.” What she really means is: Smart businesses will support our agenda. If they do, we’ll give them billions in taxpayer and consumer money. If they oppose us, we will crush them. And when we say innovation, we don’t mean fracking.

As to responding to these inconvenient climate realities, or debating them with the thousands of scientists who reject the “dangerous manmade climate change” tautology, she responds: “The time for arguing about climate change has passed. The vast majority of scientists agree that our climate is changing.”

This absurd, dismissive assertion underscores citizen investigative journalist Russell Cook’s findings, in his perceptive and fascinating Merchants of Smear report. The climate catastrophe narrative survives only because there has been virtually no debate over its scientific claims, he explains. The public rarely sees the extensive evidence debunking and destroying climate cataclysm assertions, because alarmists insist that “the science is settled,” refuse to acknowledge or debate anyone who says otherwise, and claim skeptical scientists get paid by oil companies, tainting anything they say.

“No one has ever offered an iota of evidence” that oil interests paid skeptical researchers to change their science to fit industry views, :despite legions of people repeating the claim,” Cook notes. “Never has so much, the very survival of the global warming issue depended on so little a paper-thin accusation from people having hugely troubling credibility issues of their own.” The tactic is intended to marginalize manmade global warming skeptics. But the larger problem is mainstream media malfeasance: reporters never question “climate crisis” dogmas...or allegations that “climate denier” scientists are willing to fabricate studies questioning “settled science” for a few grand in illicit industry money.

Pay no attention to the real-world climate or those guys behind the curtain, we are told. Just worry about climate monsters conjured up by their computer models. “Climate change deniers” are Big Oil lackeys and you should turn a blind eye to the billions of dollars in government, industry and foundation money paid annually to researchers and modelers who subscribe to manmade climate disruption claims.

In fact, the US government alone spent over $106 billion in taxpayer funds on alarmist climate research between 2003 and 2010. In return, the researchers refuse to let other scientists, IPCC reviewers or FOIA investigators see their raw data, computer codes or CO2-driven algorithms. The modelers and scientists claim the information is private property, even though taxpayers paid for the work and the results are used to justify energy, job and economy-killing policies and regulations. Uncle Sam spends billions more every year on renewable energy programs that raise energy prices, cost jobs and reduce living standards.

None of these recipients wants to derail this money train, by entertaining doubts about the “climate crisis.” Al Gore won’t debate anyone or even address audience questions he hasn’t preapproved.

As to claims of a “97% consensus,” one source is responses from 75 of 77 “climate scientists” who were selected from a 2010 survey that went to 10,257 scientists. Apparently, the analysts didn’t like the “consensus” of the other 10,180 scientists. Another study, by a University of Queensland professor, claimed that 97% of published scientific papers agree that humans caused at least half of the 1.3 F (0.7 C) global warming since 1950; in reality, only 41 of the 11,944 papers cited explicitly said this.

“Skeptical” scientists do not say climate doesn’t change or humans don’t affect Earth’s climate to some (small) degree. However, more than 1,000 climate scientists, 31,000 American scientists and 48% of US meteorologists say there is no evidence that we are causing dangerous warming or climate change.

Two recent United States Senate staff reports shed further light on other shady dealings that underlie the “dangerous manmade climate change” house of cards. Chains of Environmental Command reveals how Big Green activists and foundations collude with federal agencies to develop renewable energy and anti-hydrocarbon policies. EPA’s Playbook Unveiled shines a bright light on the fraud, deceit and secret science behind the agency’s sue-and-settle lawsuits, pollution standards and CO2 regulations.

The phony “solutions” to the imaginary “climate crisis” hurt our children and grandchildren, by driving up energy prices, threatening electricity reliability, thwarting job creation, adversely impacting people’s health and welfare, and subsidizing wind turbines that slaughter birds and bats. They perpetuate poverty, misery, disease and premature death in poor African and Asian countries, by blocking construction of fossil fuel power plants that would bring electricity to 1.3 billion people who still do not have it.

The caterwauling over climate change has nothing to do with real-world warming, cooling, storms or droughts. It has everything to do with an ideologically driven hatred of hydrocarbons, capitalism and economic development, and a callous disdain for middle class workers and impoverished Third World families that “progressive” activists, politicians and bureaucrats always claim to care so much about.

House and Senate committees should use studies cited above as a guide for requiring a robust pollution, health and climate debate. They should compel EPA, climate modelers and scientists to testify under oath, present their evidence and respond to tough questions. Congress should then block any regulations that do not conform to the scientific method and basic standards of honesty, transparency and solid proof.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (http://www.CFACT.org), author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death and coauthor of Cracking Big Green: To save the world from the Save-the-Earth money machine.

I have good news and bad news to report from yesterday’s meeting in West Virginia.

As I informed you earlier this week, the West Virginia Board of Education met on Wednesday to discuss proposed changes to the state’s K-12 science standards, changes that would actually allow debate on the issue of global warming.

First the good news. Because of the outpouring of response from friends like you to our request that you make your opinion known on this issue, we got word that we overwhelmed the system and caused it to crash! One board member even said at yesterday’s hearing he was amazed at the number of emails he received supporting the changes to the curriculum.

Without your input, only the alarmists would have been heard. You made sure that didn’t happen!

Also on the positive side, our CFACT Collegians made a huge impact on the tenor of the hearing and press coverage of the event. By organizing and bringing some of their peers from Marshall and West Virginia University, they proved to be the only young people to show up and speak out, and because of their passion and willingness to testify the Associated Press and local newspapers and TV networks couldn’t help but report that there was vocal support not just opposed to, but also in favor of, debate over climate change. I was never more proud of them!

Unfortunately, there is also bad news to report. Because of pressure from the powerful, Politically Correct teachers’ establishment, the board ultimately wilted and voted to rescind the proposed changes. Rather than stand for scientific accuracy and encourage students to develop critical thinking, the board moved to return to the original language that allows for no questioning or debate on climate issues.

This was indeed a sad day for public education in West Virginia.

Now there are 30 days in which to comment on the new standards, and you can rest assured CFACT will be doing just that. Others, including state legislators and even some in Congress have indicated they were inspired by this showdown in the Mountain State and say they are now looking into what can be done.

Whether they act or not, only time will tell. But the long-term battle is far from over.

Again I want to thank you for your response to our call to action. The fight for free speech, fairness, and liberty is never easy, but we remain committed to the cause. In time, we ultimately will triumph.

For nature and people too,

Craig Rucker
Executive Director

P.S. Martha Boneta will be on Stossel on Fox Business Thursday January 15 at 9 PM (Eastern) to talk about her ongoing struggle to get the Greens and Virginia bureaucrats to respect her property rights at her beautiful Liberty Farm. Stossel usually repeats Sunday nights on Fox News.

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By Cory Toth

We need your help West Virginia school board scraps changes to NGSS

The group Achieve told the State Board of Education that if they did not follow word-by-word their standards on climate science, that they would kick WV out. The Board Members are not wanting to be removed as a member of Achieve as most other states are members and WV didn’t want to be the laughing stock of the education community.

The leader of Achieve is Michael Cohen. He can be reached at mcohen@achieve.org. To make matters worse the 41-person team who put together Achieve’s “science” standards.... None are from WV; none are climate scientists…

There is a 30 day comment period using the original standard. We need your help to provide comments! They have reversed the standards and went back to the original standards. Please see attachment which shows the standards revise..which have been vacated.

I want to point out there is a gentleman on our side of this issue. His name is Wade Linger and he is on the Board of Education. He is being out voted and being bullied by these outside organizations. He would like the help of you to submit comments, provide him with information, etc… His email is wade@linger.com

Please feel free to share with your fellow colleagues to have them weigh in as well.

Thanks,

Cory

The West Virginia Board of Education voted today to scrap changes it had made to the Next Generation Science Standards to inject more doubt about global warming. The board will next consider adopting the original standards - but first, it[s opened them up for public comment, the Charleston Gazette reports.

An advocacy group called West Virginia Climate Parents, which opposed the board’s tweaks to the NGSS, presented the board with 3,500 signatures demanding a return to the original document. Members praised today’s vote and said they would keep pressure on the board to adopt the standards next month without revisions.

“Ensuring students are taught evidence-based facts in their science education is a fundamental principle that the board affirmed today, after veering off course in December in adopting altered climate science standards,” said Lisa Hoyos, director of Climate Parents. Stephanie Simon

President Obama makes it clear that the only “common ground” he respects is his liberal turf

By Paul Driessen

New Republican members were still being sworn in and expressing their desire for bipartisan initiatives, when President Obama said he would veto the Keystone pipeline, ObamaCare fixes and other bills that run counter to his agenda. Washington’s new “common ground” will be a tricky, dangerous swamp.

Meanwhile, U.S. crude oil prices are below $50 per barrel, for the first time since 2009, and natural gas has dropped below $3 per million Btu (or thousand cubic feet). That’s bad news for Iran, Russia, Venezuela and ISIS, but great news for energy users. Motorists will save billions of dollars in gasoline costs; families, factories, hospitals, schools and malls will save billions on heating and electricity bills; and industries that are energy-intensive or use hydrocarbons as raw materials will reap huge benefits.

However, drilling and oilfield service companies are being squeezed by high production rates, low prices and excessive loans; some overcapitalized companies may go bankrupt. Slow global economic growth is reducing demand for American goods and services, and investors are pulling out of “emerging markets.”

Thankfully, most fracking companies are agile and creative. Their technological innovations have driven completion and production costs steadily downward, allowing them to produce oil, gas liquids and natural gas (methane) from many formations at costs low enough to make a profit even at today’s prices (or lower). When demand picks up and prices again rise, companies can drill and frack new wells or reopen old ones in shale regions within mere weeks, to meet increasing energy needs.

But now EPA is proposing new rules for conventional and fracked wells. The White House claims the rules are needed to reduce emissions of methane, which it calls a “potent greenhouse gas” that contributes to “dangerous climate change.” The real goal is to put federal bureaucrats in charge of fracking and production on state and private lands, now that they have made most federal lands off limits to drilling.

The proposed rulemaking ignores reality. Total U.S. methane emissions have already plunged 11% since 1990, and companies constantly implement technologies and procedures to reduce emissions of valuable natural gas from wells and pipelines. That has caused emissions related to drilling and transportation to plummet, even as natural gas drilling, fracking, production, pipelining and use have skyrocketed.

Mr. Obama’s fossil fuel obstructionism will further harm blue-collar families. His own State Department concluded that the Keystone XL pipeline project alone would create 50,000 jobs: 10,000 in construction; 16,000 providing pipe, valves, heavy equipment, hotel rooms and other goods and services directly related to the project; and 26,000 “indirect” jobs supported by primary and secondary workers spending their KXL wages in other sectors of the economy. Some 70% of Americans support building it.

These jobs may only be what the President derisively calls “temporary.” But that is the nature of all such jobs. You just need a steady stream of new projects to keep construction and factory workers employed for decades - versus the “permanent’ jobs the President seems to prefer: for bureaucrats who stifle other job creation or decree that only “renewable energy” jobs merit creation via taxpayer or borrowed money.

Blocking Keystone will also increase shipments of U.S. and Canadian oil via RR cars owned by Mr. Obama’s friend, Warren Buffet. That could mean more rail accidents and deaths. Proposed rules for retrofitting rail tankers for crash and puncture resistance will take years to implement, forcing oil to be shipped in trucks on our crowded highways in the meantime. Congress needs to approve Keystone.

The President may now favor allowing some processed U.S. oil to be exported. But his agencies are preparing numerous new rules that will undermine bipartisan energy, job and economic growth initiatives. The Competitive Enterprise Institute says they are considering 2,375 new rules this year - on top of 3,541 regulations approved in 2014. The total price tag for complying with federal rules: $1.9 trillion per year!

EPA has delayed its latest climate change regulations until summer, but they will likely require that coal-fueled power plants slash carbon dioxide emissions by 30% or close down. Since no affordable or proven technology exists to achieve this, the rule will shutter numerous power plants and cost some 600,000 jobs in states that rely on coal for reliable, affordable electricity. Moreover, as my Climate Hype Exposed report makes clear, the rules will do absolutely nothing to “stabilize” Earth’s always fickle climate.

President Obama’s determination to lock the United States and other countries into a binding new climate change treaty will magnify the damage many times over. First, developing nations like China and India must merely agree to try at some future date to make some efforts to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Other countries can walk away from treaty obligations that become too burdensome. That will penalize the United States as almost the only nation required to abide by its suicidal climate agreements.

Second, few (formerly) rich countries will ever honor their supposed commitments to provide billions of dollars a year for climate change “adaptation” and “mitigation” - and those contributions will never come anywhere near the $100 billion per year that poor developing countries are demanding as their price for signing a treaty. Third, most of this money will end up in Swiss bank accounts of kleptocratic African, UN and other dictators, bureaucrats, politicians, activists and corporatists. The poor will get nothing.

Fourth, most of this promised aid - as well as OPIC, World Bank and other loans and grants - comes with the proviso that the money be used only for wind, solar and biofuel projects. Poor countries will be prevented from building coal or gas power plants to lift billions out of poverty via reliable, affordable electricity. Billions of people will remain trapped in poverty, misery, disease and early death - with improved education, healthcare, jobs, food, clean water and sanitation remaining largely out of reach.

What can the new Republican Congress do in the face of the President’s ideological intransigence?

* End abuses detailed in the Senate Staff Report, Chains of Environmental Command, and other studies that reveal how Big Green colludes with federal agencies to impose job-killing policies and regulations. Hold hearings and question agency heads under oath. Root out collusion between agencies and activists, sweetheart sue-and-settle lawsuits, and other agency misconduct, deceit and fraud in devising regulations. Apply the same ethics and integrity rules to them that they impose on us.

* Require that EPA and other agencies fully and honestly assess the potentially harmful effects that their regulations are likely to have on jobs and human health and well-being - and subject proposed rulemakings to review by industry and other independent outside experts - before rules can be implemented. Alleged benefits of rules must clearly exceed their monetary, job, health and welfare costs.

* Require congressional approval of any “major” regulatory actions likely to cost $100 million or more - and periodic assessments of the cumulative costs of all federal regulations.

* Prohibit the Executive Branch from spending taxpayer funds on climate change “adaptation/mitigation” payments to developing countries, until all other countries make binding pledges and we have proof of manmade climate change. Ban requirements that grants be used solely for renewable energy projects.

* Use vetoes and Democratic obstinacy to underscore the need for more pro-growth and environmental-balance candidates in 2016 congressional and presidential elections - by showing leadership and responsible alternatives to eight years of Reid, Pelosi and Obama obstruction and job destruction.

State governors, legislatures, courts and AGs should do likewise - and voters should demand nothing less.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (http://www.CFACT.org) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death.

Environmentalists delivered a dire report this Christmas season: Human-caused global warming is causing wheat harvests to fall. The message was repeated uncritically by much of the mainstream media.

Had they bothered to check the facts, the media would have discovered climate alarmists were lying once again. Wheat yields are rising dramatically in the U.S. and internationally - due in part, no doubt, to the fertilizing effect of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations.

In his regular column at Forbes.com, James M. Taylor - a senior fellow of The Heartland Institute, which distributes Climate Change Weekly - refutes alarmists’ claims concerning wheat production by going directly to the data. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports global wheat yields have risen by 33 percent since 1994. In addition, there has been a 4 percent increase in land acreage growing wheat. Combined, the 33 percent increase in per-acre wheat yield and the 4 percent increase in land harvested for wheat equal an almost 40 percent increase in the global wheat harvest since 1994. Rather than slowing, yields set records in 2013 and again in 2014.

Alarmists and media lied both about general wheat trends and wheat production in specific countries and continents. For instance, Reuters cited a single report to claim wheat yields had fallen in hotter regions such as in Africa, Australia, Brazil, and India. The real data, highlighted by Taylor, tell a quite different story:

Wheat production in Egypt, the only significant producer of wheat in Africa, has quadrupled during the past 30 years, “with the past 10 years producing the 10 highest wheat crops in Egyptian history.”

In addition, “Africa’s second largest wheat producing country, Morocco, produced its highest wheat crop in history in 2013,” and South Africa produced record wheat yields in 2014.

Brazil also produced consecutive years of record wheat yields in 2013 and 2014, 2014’s wheat crop being 30 percent larger than 2013’s record yield.

India appears likely in 2014 to surpass its previous wheat production record, set in 2012.

Of the countries cited by Reuters as having falling wheat production, only Australia failed to produce a record crop in 2013 or 2014. However, as Taylor points out, “its 2014 wheat crop was the eighth largest in its history,” with the record yield set just three years ago in 2011. Australia’s wheat production has risen steadily for four decades, with 2014’s wheat crop being four times larger than the yield in 1972.

For far too long, environmentalists and their willing dupes in the media have been allowed to make false claims unchallenged. Once the facts are checked, global warming-related food fears should fade, like darkness before the light of day.

Google’s fleet of electricity-gobbling servers makes it a hugely energy-intensive company. Its success underscores the quality of its corporate leadership. However, Chairman Eric Schmidt and his top engineers display limited knowledge and poor leadership when it comes to climate change and electricity generation. Mr. Schmidt insists that “Everyone understands climate change is occurring, and the people who oppose it are really hurting our children and our grandchildren.” His engineers replay scary claims by former NASA astronomer James Hansen that exceeding 350 parts per million of atmospheric carbon dioxide “would likely have catastrophic effects.”

Our article highlights the major errors in these claims, and explains how the scientific method clearly demonstrates the absence of evidence to support fear mongering about “catastrophic manmade climate change.”

Thank you for posting the article, quoting from it, and forwarding it to your friends and colleagues. (Please be sure to credit Chris as coauthor of this article.)

Best regards,

Paul

Chairman Eric Schmidt should heed his own advice and base energy policies on facts

In a recent interview with National Public Radio host Diane Rehm, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said his company “has a very strong view that we should make decisions in politics based on facts. And the facts of climate change are not in question anymore. Everyone understands climate change is occurring, and the people who oppose it are really hurting our children and our grandchildren and making the world a much worse place. We should not be aligned with such people. They’re just literally lying.”

While he didn’t vilify us by name, Mr. Schmidt was certainly targeting us, the climate scientists who collect and summarize thousands of articles for the NIPCC’s Climate Change Reconsidered reports, the hundreds who participate in Heartland Institute climate conferences, and the 31,487 US scientists who have signed the Oregon Petition, attesting that there is no convincing scientific evidence that humans are causing catastrophic warming or climate disruption.

All of us are firm skeptics of claims that humans are causing catastrophic global warming and climate change. We are not climate change “deniers.” We know Earth’s climate and weather are constantly in flux, undergoing recurrent fluctuations that range from flood and drought cycles to periods of low or intense hurricane and tornado activity, to the Medieval Warm Period (950-1250 AD) and Little Ice Age (1350-1850) - and even to Pleistocene glaciers that repeatedly buried continents under a mile of ice.

What we deny is the notion that humans can prevent these fluctuations, by ending fossil fuel use and emissions of plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide, which plays only an insignificant role in climate change.

The real deniers are people who think our climate was and should remain static and unchanging, such as 1900-1970, supposedly, during which time Earth actually warmed and then cooled, endured the Dust Bowl, and experienced periods of devastating hurricanes and tornadoes.

The real deniers refuse to recognize that natural forces dictate weather and climate events. They deny that computer model predictions are completely at odds with real world events, that there has been no warming since 1995, and that several recent winters have been among the coldest in centuries in the United Kingdom and continental Europe, despite steadily rising CO2 levels. They refuse to acknowledge that, as of December 25, it’s been 3,347 days since a Category 3-5 hurricane hit the US mainland; this is by far the longest such stretch since record-keeping began in 1900, if not since the American Civil War.

Worst of all, they deny that their “solutions” hurt our children and grandchildren, by driving up energy prices, threatening electricity reliability, thwarting job creation, and limiting economic growth in poor nations to what can be sustained via expensive wind, solar, biofuel and geothermal energy. Google’s corporate motto is “Don’t be evil.” From our perspective, perpetuating poverty, misery, disease and premature death in poor African and Asian countries - in the name or preventing climate change - is evil.

It is truly disturbing that Mr. Schmidt could make a statement so thoroughly flawed in its basic premise. He runs a multi-billion dollar company that uses vast quantities of electricity to disseminate information throughout the world. Perhaps he should speak out on issues he actually understands. Perhaps he would be willing to debate us or Roy Spencer, David Legates, Pat Michaels and other climate experts.

Setting aside the irrational loyalty of alarmists like Schmidt to a failed “dangerous manmade climate change” hypothesis, equally disturbing is the money wasted because of it. Consider an article written for the Institute of Electric and Electronic Engineers’ summit website by Google engineers Ross Koningstein and David Fork, who worked on Google’s “RE

Beginning in 2007, they say, "Google committed significant resources to tackle the world's climate and energy problems. A few of these efforts proved very successful: Google deployed some of the most energy efficient data centers in the world, purchased large amounts of renewable energy, and offset what remained of its carbon footprint."

It's wonderful that Google improved the energy efficiency of its power-hungry data centers. But the project spent countless dollars and man hours. To what other actual benefits? To address precisely what climate and energy problems? And how exactly did Google offset its carbon footprint? By buying "carbon credits" from outfits like the New Forests Company, which drove impoverished Ugandan villagers out of their homes, set fire to their houses and burned a young boy to death?

What if, as skeptics like us posit and actual evidence reflects, man-made climate change is not in fact occurring? That would mean there is no threat to humans or our planet, and lowering Google's CO2 footprint would bring no benefits. In fact, it would keep poor nations poverty stricken and deprived of modern technologies - and thus unable to adapt to climate change. Imagine what Google could have accomplished if its resources had been channeled to solving actual problems with actual solutions!

In 2011, the company decided its REC project would not meet its goals. Google shut it down. In their article, Koningstein and Fork admit that the real result of all of their costly research was to reach the following conclusion: “green energy is simply not economically, viable and resources that we as a society waste in trying to make it so would be better used to improve the efficiencies in established energy technologies like coal.”

Skeptics like us reached that conclusion long ago. It is the primary reason for our impassioned pleas that that the United States and other developed nations stop making energy policy decisions based on the flawed climate change hypothesis. However, the article’s most breathtaking statement was this:

“Climate scientists have definitively shown that the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere poses a looming danger,,, A 2008 paper by James Hansen, former director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies… showed the true gravity of the situation. In it, Hansen set out to determine what level of atmospheric CO2 society should aim for ‘if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted.’ His climate models showed that exceeding 350 parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere would likely have catastrophic effects. We’\’ve already blown past that limit. Right now, environmental monitoring shows concentrations around 400 ppm”.

We would never presume to question the sincerity, intellect, dedication or talent of these two authors. However, this statement presents a stunning failure in applying Aristotelian logic. Even a quick reading would make the following logical conclusions instantly obvious:

1. Hansen theorized that 350 ppm of atmospheric CO2 would have catastrophic results.

2. CO2 did indeed reach this level, and then exceeded it by a significant amount.

3. There were no consequences, much less catastrophic results, as our earlier points make clear.

This kind of reasoning (the scientific method) has served progress and civilization well since the Seventeenth Century. But the Google team has failed to apply it; instead it repeats the “slash fossil fuel use or Earth and humanity are doomed” tautology, without regard for logic or facts - while questioning CAGW skeptics intelligence, character and ethics. Such an approach would be disastrous in business.

We enthusiastically support Eric Schmidt’s admonition that our nation base its policy decisions on facts, even when those facts do not support an apocalyptic environmental worldview. We also support President Obama’s advice that people should not “engage in self-censorship,” because of bullying or “because they don’t want to offend the sensibilities of someone whose sensibilities probably need to be offended.”

In fact, we will keep speaking out, regardless of what Messsrs. Schmidt, Hansen and Obama might say.

_______

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (http://www.CFACT.org), author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power Black death and coauthor of Cracking Big Green: To save the world from the save-the-earth money machine. Chris Skates is an environmental chemist and author of Going Green: For some it has nothing to do with the environment.

Thanks to the blog of the irrepressible Hilary Ostrov, a long-time WUWT commenter, I found out about a poll gone either horribly wrong or totally predictably depending on your point of view. It’s a global poll done by the United Nations, with over six million responses from all over the planet, and guess what?

The revealed truth is that of the sixteen choices given to people regarding what they think are the important issues in their lives, climate change is dead last. Not only that, but in every sub-category, by age, by sex, by education, by country grouping, it’s right down at the bottom of the list. NOBODY thinks it’s important.

Now, people are always saying how the US is some kind of outlier in this regard, because polls in the US always put climate change down at the bottom, whereas polls in Europe generally rate it somewhat higher. But this is a global poll, with people chiming in from all over the planet. The top fifteen countries, in order of the number of people voting, were Mexico, Nigeria, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Yemen, Philippines, Thailand, Cameroon, United States, Ghana, Rwanda, Brazil, Jordan, and Morocco ...so this appears to be truly representative of the world, which is mostly non-industrialized nations.

So the next time someone tries to claim that climate change is “the most important challenge facing the world”....point them to the website of the study, and gently inform them that the rest of the world doesn’t buy that kind of alarmist hogwash for one minute. People are not as stupid as their leaders think, folks know what’s important and what’s trivial in their lives, and trying to control the climate is definitely in the latter group.

The poll will be open until 2015, so you can register your own priorities…

My regards to everyone, I’m off for a staff Christmas dinner with the workmates of the gorgeous ex-fiancee, life is good.

Strict new ozone standards announced by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) could be the most expensive regulation ever imposed on the American public. The current standard of 75 parts per billion (ppb)—the most stringent ever enacted when it was issued in 2008 - hasn’t been fully implemented yet. Even so, air quality has improved dramatically over the past decades and will continue to improve as EPA and states implement existing standards.

EPA’s move to set standards between 65 and 70 parts per billion, and to take comments on standards as low as 60 ppb, is not supported by science. A current review of health studies shows no compelling evidence that more stringent standards are needed when the current standards already protect public health.

The cost to the economy, jobs and consumers could be significant. A recent study from NERA Economic Consulting commissioned by the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) shows that further tightening ozone standards to the lowest level EPA is considering could result in:

A loss of $3.4 trillion in U.S. GDP from 2017 to 2040

2.9 million fewer job equivalents per year on average through 2040

Increased natural gas and electricity costs for businesses and families across the country

Standards that would impose unachievable emission reduction requirements on virtually every part of the nation are clearly a misguided overreach. Even pristine areas with no industrial activity such as national parks could be out of attainment. Operating under such stringent requirements could stifle new investments necessary to create jobs and grow our economy. The right policy choice is to implement the current standards and allow air quality to continue to improve.

Scientists are human and have their opinions. Although we may like to think of science as a purely objective search after truth, we have to be realistic. It would be all but impossible for a researcher to start an experiment without having some idea about the expected outcome. Objectivity then comes in the form of a willingness to accept evidence which points to a different answer. Nevertheless, in most cases there is likely to be a tendency towards confirmation bias: giving more weight to observations which conform to your expectations or opinions.

A well-known example of this is the determination of the charge on an electron, famously first measured in the Millikan oil-drop experiment just over a hundred years ago. This balanced the gravitational pull on tiny oil drops by an applied electric field. Millikan arrived at a value (to five significant figures) which was very close to the accepted present-day value, but it turned out he had the wrong value for one of the factors in the equation. The ever-insightful and quotable Richard Feynman spoke about this in his 1974 commencement address at Caltech (’cargo cult science’:

“...Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It’s a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It’s interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan’s, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.

Why didn’t they discover the new number was higher right away? It’s a thing that scientists are ashamed of - this history - because it’s apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan’s, they thought something must be wrong- and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan’s value they didn’t look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off...”.

That is one form of human behaviour we can probably do little about. But there comes a point beyond which science itself is misused and compromised. Rather than having evidence-based policymaking, we end up with policy-based evidence picking. A good (or, should I say, bad) example appeared in the Times this week. The headline says it all: Scientists accused of plotting to get pesticides banned.

The fuss is over the (currently temporary) EU ban on neonicotinoid insecticides over allegations that they are at least partly to blame for recent declines in the population of bees. Environmentalist groups had been campaigning against this class of compounds for many years, despite little evidence of any connection under real life conditions. What tipped the balance was a report from the Task Force on Systemic Pesticides, an advisory group to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which reported on recent scientific work and called on regulators to “start planning for a global phase-out” of these insecticides.

However, the chairman of the Task Force, Maarten Bijleveld van Lexmond, and chairman of the IUCN, Piet Wit, were both at a meeting in Switzerland in June 2010 at which, according to a note leaked to the Times “...scientists agreed to select authors to produce four papers and co-ordinate their publication to ‘obtain the necessary policy change, to have these pesticides banned’. A paper by a ‘carefully selected first author’ would set out the impact of the pesticides on insects and birds ‘as convincingly as possible’. A second ‘policy forum’ paper would draw on the first to call for a ban..."If we are successful in getting these two papers published, there will be enormous impact, and a campaign led by WWF etc. It will be much harder for politicians to ignore a research paper and a policy forum paper in [a major scientific journal].’”

This smacks of environmental activism rather than objective science, despite the protestations of the Task Force chairman, “...a founding member of WWF in the Netherlands, that the Task Force was independent and unbiased.”

It seems that only scientists outside government and industry are to be regarded as independent. Self-selected bodies such as WWF are inevitably groups of like-minded people and seemingly intolerant of any dissent. Contrast this particular case, in which ‘independent’ activist scientists protest their innocence (and attract little public criticism, unfortunately) with the campaign against the European Commission’s soon-to-be ex-chief scientist, Professor Anne Glover (Chief scientist is forced out after green campaign).

Professor Glover was found guilty of holding the ‘wrong’ opinions about GM crops. The same Stalinist intolerance has also been used to keep the management board of the European Food Safety Authority free of anyone who did not conform to the ‘independent’ template. Professional scientists should be prepared to listen to conflicting views, if based on hard evidence, and not simply suppress them.

In a different area, we are now being told that World on course for warmest year, with plenty of talk of supposed increases in the incidence of extreme weather. Now, it may turn out that average temperatures in 2014 will be fractionally up on the previous high, but it is equally true to say that there has been no trend in either direction since 1998. The latest stories, put out to coincide with the current climate change talks in Lima (COP20), are designed to put pressure on negotiators to make progress towards a binding international agreement on emissions reduction at the pivotal Paris conference in a year’s time. The selection of one of the statements about temperature over the other is a clear form of confirmation bias.

While we expect scientists to be human, we should also expect them to remain grounded in scientific principles and be prepared to question their beliefs if the evidence contradicts them. To do otherwise is to compromise the integrity of the scientific community, the very characteristic which makes scientists among the most trusted groups in society.

Note here is the actual year to data anomalies based oon the 4 times a day initialization that goes into the forecast models. No adjustments like homogenization are made. Does that look like the warmest year ever to you. Note the 90N and 90S is actually a point but is stretched in this projection to the same distance as the circumference at the equator. In other words it exaggerates the areal coverage of any high latitude warmth. Note the global mean compared to the 1979 to 2010 climatology is just +1.08C.

So they have come up with 66 reasons to date as to why the models are failing instead of that they have given greenhouse gases credit for controlling climate when natural factors are the real drivers.

The latest is that small volcanoes are acting collectively to produce a veil of sulfate aerosols to block radiation. Of course is is well known that the number of global volcanoe remains about the same. Ash and sulfat aerosols from small volcanoes gets precipitated out in a few weeks. The big volcanoes that shoot to 80,000 to 120,000 feet of higher are the climate driver events. In the stable high atmosphere the aerosols spread around the globe and have a lifetime of a few years instead of a few weeks.

See how the big eruptions of Pinatubo and El Chichon cooled the globe by up to 0.5C for several years. If anything the lack of volcanoes may have contributed to the warming after 1995 when the volcanic efects diminished.

When I did a correlation with temperatues in years with aerosol levels more 0.5 STD above normal and 0.5 STD below normal, I found the expected ressult of cooling when the aerosols were high and warming when low.

Here is Anthony Watts post on the paper subjecting the small eruoption may be responsible for failed models.
Anthony Watts November 19, 2014

Small volcanic eruptions could be slowing global warming

From the AGU: WASHINGTON, DC

Small volcanic eruptions might eject more of an atmosphere-cooling gas into Earth’s upper atmosphere than previously thought, potentially contributing to the recent slowdown in global warming, according to a new study.

Scientists have long known that volcanoes can cool the atmosphere, mainly by means of sulfur dioxide gas that eruptions expel. Droplets of sulfuric acid that form when the gas combines with oxygen in the upper atmosphere can remain for many months, reflecting sunlight away from Earth and lowering temperatures. However, previous research had suggested that relatively minor eruptions those in the lower half of a scale used to rate volcano “explosivity” do not contribute much to this cooling phenomenon.

Now, new ground, air and satellite measurements show that small volcanic eruptions that occurred between 2000 and 2013 have deflected almost double the amount of solar radiation previously estimated. By knocking incoming solar energy back out into space, sulfuric acid particles from these recent eruptions could be responsible for decreasing global temperatures by 0.05 to 0.12 degrees Celsius (0.09 to 0.22 degrees Fahrenheit) since 2000, according to the new study accepted to Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

These new data could help to explain why increases in global temperatures have slowed over the past 15 years, a period dubbed the ‘global warming hiatus,’ according to the study’s authors.

The warmest year on record is 1998. After that, the steep climb in global temperatures observed over the 20th century appeared to level off. Scientists previously suggested that weak solar activity or heat uptake by the oceans could be responsible for this lull in temperature increases, but only recently have they thought minor volcanic eruptions might be a factor.

Climate projections typically don’t include the effect of volcanic eruptions, as these events are nearly impossible to predict, according to Alan Robock, a climatologist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., who was not involved in the study. Only large eruptions on the scale of the cataclysmic 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines, which ejected an estimated 20 million metric tons (44 billion pounds) of sulfur, were thought to impact global climate. But according to David Ridley, an atmospheric scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and lead author of the new study, classic climate models weren’t adding up.

“The prediction of global temperature from the [latest] models indicated continuing strong warming post-2000, when in reality the rate of warming has slowed,” said Ridley. That meant to him that a piece of the puzzle was missing, and he found it at the intersection of two atmospheric layers, the stratosphere and the troposphere- the lowest layer of the atmosphere, where all weather takes place. Those layers meet between 10 and 15 kilometers (six to nine miles) above the Earth.

Traditionally, scientists have used satellites to measure sulfuric acid droplets and other fine, suspended particles, or aerosols, that erupting volcanoes spew into the stratosphere. But ordinary water-vapor clouds in the troposphere can foil data collection below 15 km, Ridley said. :The satellite data does a great job of monitoring the particles above 15 km, which is fine in the tropics. However, towards the poles we are missing more and more of the particles residing in the lower stratosphere that can reach down to 10 km.”

To get around this, the new study combined observations from ground-, air- and space-based instruments to better observe aerosols in the lower portion of the stratosphere.

Four lidar systems measured laser light bouncing off aerosols to estimate the particles’ stratospheric concentrations, while a balloon-borne particle counter and satellite datasets provided cross-checks on the lidar measurements. A global network of ground-based sun-photometers, called AERONET, also detected aerosols by measuring the intensity of sunlight reaching the instruments. Together, these observing systems provided a more complete picture of the total amount of aerosols in the stratosphere, according to the study authors.

Including these new observations in a simple climate model, the researchers found that volcanic eruptions reduced the incoming solar power by - 0.19 plus/minus 0.09 watts of sunlight per square meter of the Earth’s surface during the ‘global warming hiatus’, enough to lower global surface temperatures by 0.05 to 0.12 degrees Celsius (0.09 to 0.22 degrees Fahrenheit). By contrast, other studies have shown that the 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption warded off about three to five watts per square meter at its peak, but tapered off to background levels in the years following the eruption. The shading from Pinatubo corresponded to a global temperature drop of 0.5 degrees Celsius (0.9 degrees Fahrenheit).

Robock said the new research provides evidence that there may be more aerosols in the atmosphere than previously thought. “This is part of the story about what has been driving climate change for the past 15 years,” he said. “It’s the best analysis we’ve had of the effects of a lot of small volcanic eruptions on climate.”

Ridley said he hopes the new data will make their way into climate models and help explain some of the inconsistencies that climate scientists have noted between the models and what is being observed.

Robock cautioned, however, that the ground-based AERONET instruments that the researchers used were developed to measure aerosols in the troposphere, not the stratosphere. To build the best climate models, he said, a more robust monitoring system for stratospheric aerosols will need to be developed.

The sulphuric acid reacts not just “oxygen” O2 but ozone : O3. Ozone blocks UV , so less UV is one cause of warming. Sorry UN, none of this has to do with CFCs the Montreal protocol as can be seem from first plot. CFCs have not been bouncing up and down in time with major volacanic eruptions.

There’s more than just the ozone, but if they want to talk about ozone it’s in the stratosphere where it counts, not at 15km.

At least they working with real data but the claimed excuse for the pause is just more maybe, could-be pseudo-science.